"We are determined to do everything we can to help homeowners avoid repossessions," said Gordon Brown this week, as he announced what he claimed was "new guidance for the judiciary to halt or adjourn court action on repossessions, unless alternative options that help the homeowner … have been fully examined".

If that conjures up a vision of dozens of Judge Dredds ready to place their titanium-covered bodies between the vicious mortgage lender and the struggling homeowner, it is probably just the sort of impression the prime minister wanted to create. In reality, though, Brown has clutched at a pretty limited administrative change - more to do with the smooth running of the courts than preventing people being thrown out on to the streets - and presented it as a major initiative to halt repossessions.

Let's be clear: the new guidance is not for judges. The protocol he was alluding to is a set of guidelines from the Civil Justice Council (not the government) to lenders - procedures they ought to follow but are not obliged to.

They include such sensible things as encouraging (not enforcing) contact between lender and homeowner before they go to court; saying lenders should (not must) take reasonable steps to ensure information can be understood by the borrower; and should (not must) consider a reasonable request from the borrower to change the date of regular payment if that would help.

There is plenty more useful advice, but it is all already good practice among respectable mortgage providers and covered by similar guidance under the Financial Services Authority's conduct of business rules. A Council of Mortgage Lenders spokeswoman told me: "It would be a misrepresentation to say that it [the protocol] has anything new or lenders should be doing anything different", though she insisted it was a significant step to bring the guidance under the watchful eye of a judge.

Judge Robert Jordan, chairman of the CJC committee which drafted the protocol (not as a response to the credit crunch), was at pains this week to point out that it "does not change the courts' limited powers to deal with these cases". Judges already have the discretion for limited adjournments (under the Administration of Justice Act 1970 section 36), but they have been given no new powers and certainly cannot "halt" repossession as Brown seems to believe.

The clue is in the second sentence of the protocol: "This Protocol does not alter the parties' rights and obligations." There was, in fact, a long-running battle within the CJC over this, with radical voices wanting the protocol to be given teeth - sanctions that might have included cost orders against lenders for not following the procedures or powers to halt repossession. But a rearguard action, notably by the CML, successfully blocked any such move.

So what are we to make of Brown's statement? One housing barrister suggested to me it was simply a "layman's mistake", but others take a more sceptical view. The CJC should be mightily miffed that its hard work has been plucked away, bandied about the Commons and spun into something it's not by a prime minister desperate for an initiative to show he was "doing something" about the home loans catastrophe. If he was simply misinformed then he had better get on and really do something because a gentlemanly, voluntary, administrative protocol is not going to solve the housing crisis.